Brutal reality of sports stars being seriously hurt on TV

Andrew Flintoff glares at the director of his eponymous documentary as he accuses television of treating him like 'a piece of meat'.
'Even you with your questions,' he tells John Dower in a gripping exchange about the horrific Top Gear crash that left him scarred for life and wishing he had died.
'I think that's the danger that TV falls into. And I found out the hard way, eventually,' Flintoff says towards the end of the Disney+ film. 'It's always more, isn't it? Everybody wants more. Everybody wants that thing that nobody has seen before. Everyone wants that bigger stunt. Everybody [thinks], 'Actually, in some ways, let's have that near-miss, because then that'll get viewers'. Everything's about viewers. Always. Always.'
That Dower, an award-winning film-maker, agrees makes the exchange feel like a wake-up call to an industry that has long provided a second career for the country's most telegenic sporting stars but has not necessarily done so with their best interests in mind.
Flintoff is among a rare breed whose popularity or personality have taken them beyond covering the sport that first made them famous. Before him came John Fashanu and Sharron Davies on Gladiators and Ian Wright, whose TV credits include presenting a reboot of the same programme and his own chat show. There was Chris Kamara, who fronted Ninja Warrior UK and Cash in the Attic. While Kriss Akabusi and Linford Christie both presented Record Breakers. More recently Jermaine Jenas hosted The One Show before sabotaging his BBC career and bid to succeed Gary Lineker on Match of the Day. And who would have thought life after Manchester United, Aston Villa and Coventry City would have involved Dion Dublin fronting Homes Under the Hammer?
Of course, none of these names have suffered the kind of life-changing injuries during their broadcasting careers as Flintoff, who is now as famous for his near-fatal stint on Top Gear, and programmes such as A League of Their Own and a revival of Bullseye, as for his Ashes-winning heroics. But neither is the 47-year-old the only British sporting icon to be seriously hurt filming a television show.
Olympic medallist Beth Tweddle suffered one of the worst injuries when she broke her back while appearing on The Jump. Davies, the Olympic swimming silver medallist who joined Gladiators in 1995 as 'Amazon', was forced to quit the following year after snapping the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) while taking part in an event called Pyramid. 'With the knee, I just hauled this girl off the pyramid and she landed really awkward on it sideways and, obviously, the cruciate ligament just went,' Davies tells Telegraph Sport.
'I've had 10 operations since. I had an ACL reconstruction, had about 10 ops and I've got really bad arthritis in that knee because of it.'
Comparing the likes of Pyramid with the events played in the current BBC Gladiators reboot, she adds: 'It wouldn't get past health and safety now. It literally wouldn't. Nowadays, health and safety is very different, which is why a lot of the games are much tamer than they were in the '90s.'
Davies says she received a 'small payout' of around £20,000, which even taking into account inflation, was a tiny fraction of the £9 million Flintoff reportedly got from the BBC after his accident.
She adds: 'The health and safety was definitely a lot more lax and we did have quite a few injuries. People falling off Pole-Axe and hurting necks and all sorts of things.'
Davies also says she suffered 'two broken ribs and all sorts of issues' while taking part in Dancing on Ice in 2010. 'I carried on as long as I possibly could but the problem is, me being so very tall, the dynamics of what we were doing just, every time I got picked up, they were just squeezing my ribs, so it was absolutely difficult. And, in the end, the hospital were saying, 'Look, if you're not careful, you'll end up with a punctured lung'.'
Davies, who did not quit the show but was voted off, adds: 'I had injections in my shoulder. I had all sorts of things going on.'
Even her stint presenting The Big Breakfast in the mid-1990s was not without its health challenges. 'I ended up getting bronchiolitis, which I'd never done in my life, because I was getting up at three-o'clock in the morning.' she says. 'It's like a very, very bad chest infection and I just couldn't get rid of it.'
Yet, the 61-year-old says she is 'philosophical' about the physical toll all this has taken on her, particularly a knee injury she had a 'clean out' on as recently as December. 'You know what you're saying yes to,' she says. 'And then you have to be aware that things happen.'
She blames Flintoff's life-changing injuries on 'whoever's fault it was to not make him wear a crash helmet' while he was driving a three-wheeled open-top roadster. 'That was a serious mistake. I'm not sure that you'd be getting all this from Andrew now if it wasn't for the fact that he'd had that accident.'
Indeed, Flintoff's own wife and agent respectively claim he was 'looking for that buzz that he had from playing cricket' and that he became 'a daredevil' on Top Gear 'because he naturally challenges himself'.
Davies says: 'Someone like Andrew got offered all of these incredible opportunities to go and do risky things because of the type of person he was. And, because of the type of person he was, he said yes. And he went off and he enjoyed most of them. And, the weird thing is, had that accident not happened, who's to say that he wouldn't still be doing Top Gear?'
Davies did quit one show, Celebrity Island with Bear Grylls, which she appeared on in 2017. 'I wish I'd said 'no thank you' to Bear Grylls: The Island. That was quite horrible,' she says. 'This is literally where they dump you on an island with a machete and just leave you there. And we didn't have any food for nine days. Nothing. No water for three days, which is way worse.
'We all ended up with swamp hands and swamp feet, where you're so wet that they swell up three times the size. Oh, God. It was horrendous. It really was horrendous!'
She claims she quit after programme-makers failed to honour an agreement to let her have contact with home 'every couple of days' due to a family member suffering a bereavement shortly before she was due to take part.
'After three weeks on the island, I just went, 'F--- this, I'm going home', because I am now petrified that something's happening.' The production company behind the programme, which last aired in 2018, did not respond to a request for comment.
Davies branded reality television 'absolutely mercenary', adding: 'They are mercenary to members of the general public who want their five minutes of fame, and they will just go on to the next person. And they don't care about the consequences. Because it's fodder. You are fodder.'
This is not a view shared by Phil Tufnell, the last England cricketer before Flintoff to make the leap from that sport into mainstream television. That owed everything to him winning I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here! in 2003.
'It was great fun! I thoroughly enjoyed it,' he says of his time on the programme's second series. His triumph paved the way for a TV career that included a stint as captain on the original sports-themed comedy panel show They Think It's All Over and a remarkable 13 years in the same role on A Question of Sport before he, Sue Barker and Matt Dawson were axed from the programme by the BBC.
Tufnell, who has also made numerous appearances as a reporter for The One Show, says he has yet to watch the Flintoff documentary and sidesteps questions about his former England team-mate's view of the TV industry. Asked if he can recall any negative experiences of his own, he replies: 'Not particularly. Like in sport, you come and go.'
He adds of Flintoff: 'I kind of understand what he means that, one minute, you're captain of England and then, the next minute, you're not. And, so, you have to sort of reinvent yourself a little bit perhaps.'
Tufnell says he can recall few offers within television that he has turned down beyond one for him to 'pose naked' – 'I thought to myself, 'I don't think I'll do that'' – and another for him to host the Playboy Channel – 'I'm glad I gave that one a miss!'
Despite being one of sport's big crossover stars, he says he does not know why he and the likes of Flintoff had managed to move into mainstream television when others had not. He adds of his own transition: 'I just went along, all ears, kept my eyes open, and was enthusiastic. If you're enthusiastic about things, it gets you quite a long way, I find, and if you've got energy and – as my father always said – keep a smile on your face, and you just go along, and if you're doing things that are interesting [that helps].'
Jeremy Guscott was among the first stars of rugby union to branch out from punditry duties on the likes of the Six Nations. Starting in regional television, the former Bath and England centre was still playing when he was thrust into Saturday night primetime TV by replacing Fashanu on Gladiators. He also worked on daytime television on City Hospital. Comparing his own experience of the industry with that of Flintoff, Guscott says: 'I was treated really, really well.' He also says that, unlike Davies, he 'didn't see' anything during his own time on Gladiators that was a cause for concern.
'Being a Gladiator, it's hard,' he says. 'But I think you're hoping that your agent's signed you up to something and you might be old enough or wise enough or streetwise enough to know what's good and what's not and what your aftercare might be. I played rugby, you signed a contract. You got a lawyer to read it over and you got your medical insurance in place. Or you didn't.'
Guscott admits there was one thing he did not enjoy about the show, and about TV more generally. 'I don't think I'm built to memorise script,' he says, recalling getting the names of contenders 'muddled up' on Gladiators and having to reshoot whole sequences. He also reveals he said no to I'm A Celebrity… – 'I'm not good with creepy crawlies' – as well as to celebrity ski-jumping show The Jump, which he says was due to the risk of getting seriously hurt.
No show has injured more of Britain's sporting idols than The Jump, which aired between 2014 and 2017. Sir Steve Redgrave (broken hand), Sir Bradley Wiggins (broken leg), Rebecca Adlington (dislocated shoulder), Christie (hamstring) and Tweddle (broken back) were all forced to quit the programme. Even 2016 winner Ben Cohen (face) was among the 34 celebrities hurt during the show's four-year run (Tufnell took part in 2015 when he was the first contestant eliminated).
It never returned after Tweddle sued programme makers over her injury, saying: 'I'm not sure I'll ever be 100 per cent again.' Telegraph Sport has been told production company Twofour admitted liability after initially denying responsibility. It did not respond to requests for comment about a case which, according to court documents, was eventually closed in October 2022, not long before Flintoff's Top Gear crash.
Whether television heeds the wake-up call Flintoff delivers in his documentary remains to be seen. But if all that has befallen him fails to convince television that it needs to change then nothing ever will.

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